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Bilingual Pesticide Labels: Farmworkers Deserve No Less

Farmworkers feed the world. Anyone who eats and who purchases food
at a grocery store in the US has an intimate connection to farmworkers, whether
they are aware of it or not. Some 50 years after the birth of the farmworker
movement in California, farmworkers are still virtually invisible, even though
agriculture in our country could not exist without them. Yet, farmworkers risk
daily exposure to pesticides, and the consequent health impacts, in the course
of their daily work.

Our food supply in the United States today depends largely on the hard
work of an agricultural labor force that plants, cultivates, harvests, and
packs the food crops that we all depend on for sustenance. That labor force
today is made up largely of men and women of Hispanic background. Statistics
show that these farmworkers have some of the highest rates of chemically-related
illnesses of any workers in the US. Farmworkers are at the nexus of the
agricultural industry’s use of some 1.1 billion pounds (1) of pesticides
annually. While the EPA has developed the Worker Protection Standards in an
effort to protect farmworkers from pesticide exposure, lack of compliance,
problems with enforcement, and weaknesses in the standards themselves all
amount to inadequate health and safety protections for workers. One action,
however, could go a long way toward rectifying what amounts to an injustice
against these workers: bilingual pesticide labeling.

Thousands of different kinds and millions of pounds of chemical
pesticides are used in agriculture in the US every single day. Material Safety
Data Sheets (MSDS) are required to accompany every pesticide product registered
for use by the EPA. The MSDS contains critically important information about
the proper usage, disposal, and application methods for the particular
pesticide product. While some of the information relates to the specified crops
and specific usage conditions, other information is of vital importance to the
people who are working with the pesticide, such as instructions for safe use
and handling. Critical information for handlers, such as the proper personal
protective equipment (PPE), the required re-entry interval (REI), proper
disposal of empty pesticide containers to avoid soil or watercontamination
and/or human exposure, proper first aid, not to mention the acute signs and
symptoms of pesticide exposure, is included on the labels. Yet, except for a
few rare exceptions, those MSDS sheets are written only in English.

According to the National Agricultural Workers Survey, 81% of
farmworkers reported Spanish as their native language and 53% said that they
cannot read, write or speak English. Pesticide labels contain EPA-required information
in order to safeguard the environment and reduce the risk to human health. Yet,
the majority of the people who work around and/or are exposed to these
pesticides do not have access to that information, since they do not read
English. That is why, in 2010, Migrant Clinicians Network, Farmworker Justice, and
several other organizations petitioned EPA to require pesticide manufacturers
to print pesticide labels in both English and Spanish. In response, EPA opened
up a public comment period on bilingual pesticide labels that closed in June,
2011. The Farmworker Association of Florida (FWAF) and PSR, along with other
farmworker, environmental health, and workers’ groups around the country,
submitted comments to EPA in support of the need for bilingual pesticide
labels.

As recently as ten years ago, there were very few scientific
studies on the long-term and chronic health effects of exposure to various
pesticides and/or classes of pesticides. In recent years, that knowledge
deficit has begun to change. Chronic exposure to pesticides can result in
long-term and severe health consequences. Parkinson’s disease, as well as
reproductive and immune system problems, some cancers and thyroid disorders, in
addition to learning disabilities, autism, and ADHD in children have been
shown, in some studies, to be correlated with chronic pesticide exposure.
Emerging research links diabetes and obesity with higher body burden of toxins,
including pesticides. Increasingly, pesticides that had once been deemed to be safe
are coming under greater scientific scrutiny. While the environmental
persistence of the mostly (except for endosulfan) banned organochlorine
pesticides has been known for some time, new studies, such as a recent one on chlordane
(2) and autoimmune impacts on humans, are indicating that the end of their use
is not the end of their story. Chlorpyrifos (3), on the other hand, while
banned for residential use in 2001, is still commonly used in agriculture, and
has recently been linked to ADHD in children. A favorite for families’ homes
and gardens, as well as in agricultural fields and orchards, Roundup, or
glyphosate, has been found to be not so benign after all, as shown in recent
studies that link Roundup to birth defects (4) and seepage into groundwater. Mancozeb,
a fungicide, has been implicated in the notorious AgMart birth defects
incidents in Immokalee, Florida in 2005, in which three separate young
farmworker women, all of whom had worked harvesting tomatoes while they were pregnant,
gave birth to babies with severe birth defects (5).

The most sensational Immokalee case was that of Carlitos, a baby
boy born with no arms or legs. AgMart farms had a history of multiple
violations of the EPA Worker Protection Standards. The young farmworker women
probably never saw a pesticide label, and may not have been literate in Spanish
or English. However, if the persons responsible for applying the pesticides on
those fields had been able to read the labels on the pesticides that they used,
they may have been able to warn the women of the dangers to pregnant women of
working without proper protection around such toxic chemicals.

Sadly, most farmworkers are never told even the names of the
pesticides that are being used in their workplaces, much less given the
pesticide labels to read. However, the Farmworker Association of Florida, in
multiple pesticide trainings that staff have conducted over the past five years,
found that 60% of the farmworkers explicitly stated that they wanted to know
the names of the pesticides; 37% wanted to know the dangers of pesticide
exposure or what they could do to decrease the negative health effects; 6%
wanted to know how to better prepare or apply pesticides; and 4% asked to know
the re-entry period after pesticides had been sprayed.Pesticide handlers (mixers, loaders, applicators) must know the
information on the pesticide labels in order to properly store, handle, apply
and dispose of the toxic chemicals that they are using, and they must know the
health and environmental risks of improper usage and first aid procedures in
case of exposure. For Spanish-speaking pesticide handlers, English-only
pesticide labels put them at a disadvantage, with potential risk to themselves,
others, and the environment.

The agricultural industry is resisting bilingual pesticide labels,
siting cost and language variation and dialects as being prohibitive and
problematic. Yet, pesticide manufacturers are often required to translate
pesticide labels for export to other countries and this cost is easily
absorbed; and translators agree that there is a standard Spanish that is
generally universally understood by Spanish speakers. EPA already requires Worker
Protection Standards training materials in English and Spanish. If information
is deemed by EPA to be important enough to be required on a pesticide label,
then it is equally important that the information be understood by those that
are using and/or who are being exposed to the product.

Protection at the front end of
agricultural pesticide usage, in the long run, is far less expensive than improper
handling, application, and storage of pesticides. FWAF believes that providing
pesticide applicators and handlers, as well as farmworkers and others in
agriculture, access to information in a language they can read and understand
will greatly reduce the risks of needless and dangerous exposures to
themselves, to other workers, and to the environment.

Are pesticide labels in Spanish the
cure-all for protecting farmworkers from any kind of exposure to dangerous
agricultural pesticides? No, but at least it is an important place to start.

Editor's note: if
you'd like to take action on pesticide policy, click here.